John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

We’ve all seen charts and graphs like the one above. Physician burnout has become a real problem. The EHR has largely become the scapegoat for the physician burnout, but I believe it’s much more complex than that. There are a lot of pressures on doctors that are causing burnout and even physician suicide (a topic which many don’t like to talk about).

Physician burnout is indeed an important topic and one that needs to be addressed. However, I recently saw someone tweeting about physician burnout and in response, someone suggested that we should be talking about Patient Burnout as well. The idea really resonated with me. Especially because I’d never heard anyone talk about patient burnout despite it being a real problem. To better understand the effort, I asked Erin Gilmer to host this week’s #HITsm chat on Patient Burnout. I think we’ll learn a lot about this topic during the chat.

This week I’m at the CHIME Fall Forum with a wide variety of healthcare CIOs. During one of the keynotes, the speaker mentioned physician burnout and it prompted the following tweet:

Indeed. Many healthcare CIOs are burnt out as well. They have so many regulations, so many intiatives, cybersecurity issues, and much much more that’s hitting them from every angle. it’s no wonder that they’re burnt out.

This all made me realize, the whole healthcare system is burnt out. Is there anyone in healthcare that isn’t a little burnt out? Some deal with it better than others, but there’s a lot of burnout all around in healthcare.

How then do we fix all this burnout? I wish I knew the answer. Acknowledging it is the first step, but that still leaves us a long way from a solution. Hopefully we can work towards it for everyone involved.